Today’s first reading tells us that God can make use of people and events to carry out the divine plan, even when their intentions are in themselves unrelated to God’s plan.  Clearly (and admittedly in the reading) when the Assyrian ruler implements God’s plan, what he achieves “is not what he intends,” anymore than Cyrus’s intention in repatriating the exiled Jews was to further the divine plan or that Caesar Augustus’ intention in decreeing a census was to have Mary’s child be born in Bethlehem of Judea.  But the vision of faith operative in Scripture recognizes those actions as part of God’s plan.

The vision of faith does not change the data of experience, which are there for anyone —believer or unbeliever— to see.  But it changes us and, in so doing, it changes the way we read those data and, consequently, the way we respond to them.  Faced with a scattering of dots on a white page, we are probably at a loss trying to find meaning in them.  But if we place on the page an overlay with the outline of the United States and the interstate boundary lines drawn on it, we suddenly recognize some dots as Boston, New Orleans, Seattle, etc.  The vision of faith, while not identical with the above overlay, is not totally unlike it either in that it helps us to find faith meaning in the sometimes scattered data of our life experiences.

Perhaps that is why in today’s gospel reading Jesus says that “although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to the childlike.”  Human wisdom and learning alone are not the proper overlay to recognize God’s plan in the data of experience.  Single-heartedness, trust, and an awareness of God’s love and of our dependence on God’s goodness are the right overlay.  And those are childlike (not the same as childish) characteristics.